ZEGG

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
ZEGG, March 2007

The ZEGG gGmbH ( Center for Experimental Society Design ) is a non-profit educational center and ecological model project in Bad Belzig , 80 km southwest of Berlin , based on the ideas of Dieter Duhm . It is designed by a community that has been trying out an ecologically and socially sustainable way of life since 1991. The ZEGG Bildungszentrum gGmbh conducts over 120 workshops, seminars and festivals every year.

The aim is to convey a cooperative and sustainable way of life. The offer includes community knowledge and the ZEGG forum, love and sexuality, ecology and permaculture as well as artistic offers such as painting and singing courses.

ZEGG has been a member of Attac since 2001 .

Artists and well-known authors also visit the ZEGG for lectures or workshops, such as B. 2013 Christian Felber on the subject of “Economy for the Common Good”. The brain researcher Gerald Hüther was a guest at the 2015 summer camp . In 2014, ZEGG gGmbH had almost 20,000 overnight guests.

The company is run cooperatively and has been organized according to a sociocratic model for several years . The vision council advises and ensures that ZEGG gGmbH acts in the sense of its task.

On the 16 hectare site of ZEGG gGmbH there is a guest house with a restaurant, various event and seminar rooms, various residential buildings, workshops, a studio and several small earthen buildings.

The ZEGG gGmbh is recognized as a non-profit education center since, 2014.

There was public controversy about the ZEGG, especially in the early days. The community was attested to have an authoritarian structure, characteristics of a psychosect, sexism and pedophile tendencies, allegations that were rejected by the ZEGG gGmbh .

Ecology and energy

ZEGG gGmbH generates 100% of its heating requirements and 85% of the electricity on the site, almost exclusively from renewable sources or waste heat. The company's own thermal power station was converted to wood chips as early as 1991 , which are mainly obtained from the surrounding forests. Electricity and hot water are produced by four photovoltaic systems and three gas-powered combined heat and power plants . The waste heat from the large cold store is used to heat the water. The accompanying thermal insulation of the buildings enabled energy consumption to be reduced by around 40% between 1991 and 2012. Since then, further structural thermal insulation has been carried out. In 2011 the ZEGG received the second prize in the Agenda 21 competition of the Potsdam-Mittelmark district for the implementation of this energy concept.

ZEGG has built a near-natural water cycle on the site. An ecological plant-based sewage treatment plant has been in operation since 1992 , which purifies all waste water.

When designing and using the site, the ZEGG is based on ideas from permaculture . The sandy soil was made more nutritious through mulching, green manuring and the introduction of clay granules. Since 2013 ZEGG has been experimenting with terra preta production using collected urine. The urine is kept out of the wastewater cycle via collection points in the area and waterless urinals. In this way, the contained valuable substances (especially nitrogen, phosphate) can be used to build up the soil. Peaches, wine, kiwis, mulberries and figs grow in protected locations. In the ZEGG garden (2 ha), fruit and vegetables are grown according to the guidelines of organic farming . The supply from the own garden covers about 60% of the consumption of the community and the seminar business. The kitchen at ZEGG is vegetarian and partly vegan . Food from organic production, from the region or from fair trade is purchased .

The ZEGG is an eco-village and a member of the GEN eco-villages .

ZEGG forum

The forum is a psychodrama- like, ritualized form of communication between the individual and the group. A person walks into the middle of a circle of people and shares what moves them. Experienced moderators support the performer. Then the audience from the circle (if requested by the actor) give “mirrors”. Mirrors are subjective perceptions or reflections of what has been heard before. The ZEGG forum is practiced in groups of 12 to 50 participants. It was developed in the early 80s by a forerunner project of the ZEGG, the Bauhütte , under the name SD (self-presentation).

The ZEGG forum is a catalyst for personal development and a group-serving confidence-building measure. It should ensure transparency in relationships and help to reduce social and psychological tensions. The ritual improves teamwork.

Community life

Today around 100 people live in the ZEGG, including 15 children and young people. The social goal of the ZEGG is to establish a long-term communal lifestyle. To this end, the community has created its own social structure. Many community members take part in social processes in order to exchange ideas, clarify conflicts and accompany development processes. There are also regular dance evenings, lectures and cultural events. Most of the residents live in shared apartments, others as couples or alone. Children go to day care centers and schools in the area.

Love and sexuality

Of particular importance to the ZEGG community is the question of how love relationships can be successful and how sexuality can be lived in a fulfilling way. The ZEGG is a place where different forms of sexual connection are possible. There are many open relationships in which there is room for erotic adventures or firm lovers. There are people who have multiple sexual friendships, monogamous couples, and same-sex love relationships. The goal is a system of human relationships that enables the individual to be truthful and belong. Communication and an open approach to questions of love and sexuality are important tools of the community.

In the early days, the idea of free love was formative at ZEGG. Inspired by Dieter Duhm's ideas , a form of togetherness was sought in which fear and possessiveness can be overcome in love. After the radical departure of the first few years, relationships based on partnership have come to the fore today; sensuality and physical contact without sexual aspirations also play a major role.

History of the site

The site was settled for the first time in 1919, and an agricultural operation with horticulture and small animal husbandry was established. The owner at the time gave the property to the SS in the early 1930s . For the 1936 Summer Olympics , the German military rider team trained on the field. Afterwards, leaders of the Hitler Youth and the Association of German Girls were trained on the premises. The Belzig sports home was built, the goal of vacation trips as part of the mass organization Strength through Joy . In the 1950s, the GDR's unified trade union trained its functionaries on the site. At the beginning of the 1960s it was taken over by the HVA of the Ministry for State Security and converted into a training position for foreign agents under Markus Wolf . When the defected double agent Werner Stiller unmasked the agent school in 1988, it was moved to another location. At the time of the turning point in 1989, work had just begun to convert the site into a sanatorium. The construction work was stopped and it came to the Treuhandanstalt .

ZEGG GmbH bought the site in 1991 for 2.1 million DM. The ZEGG community researched the history of the site, collected old photos, contemporary documents and reports and exhibited them in the seminar building on the site.

History and criticism of the ZEGG

The original concept of the ZEGG arose from the ideas of Dieter Duhm . With his book Fear in Capitalism (1972) Duhm was one of the intellectuals of the 1968 movement. In the book, among other things, he represented the vulgar psychological approach that women harbored rape fantasies for life through the unconscious desire to be rape by their own father and sometimes experienced their first orgasm in the event of real rape . Women enjoyed violent instinctual gratification; those of them who campaigned against rape actually fought their own desire for masochistic gratification. This belittling attitude towards rape has been heavily criticized.

In 1978 Duhm founded the joint project “Bauhütte” in southern Germany to create a model for a non-violent culture. The community saw a key to this in the “healing of love between man and woman”. Therefore, among other things, she experimented with intensive group processes and free sexuality. She understood her way of life as a political statement and went public with it, which triggered controversial reports in the press. Sect allegations were raised, especially from the church, while left-wing groups accused the ZEGG of sexism . The debate continued when a group from the Bauhütte founded the ZEGG in 1991. Duhm, who never lived at the ZEGG himself, and Sabine Lichtenfels also founded the “healing biotope” Tamera in Portugal in 1994 .

ZEGG came under criticism , often with reference to Duhm's earlier statements about rape, because of its sexual orientation, an image of women that was assessed as sexist and - according to Jutta Ditfurth - also because of alleged reference to Nazi ideology . The ZEGG was also accused of pedophile positions, as well as the trivialization of child abuse , since seminars had conveyed that the processes of sexual violence were based on "a" cooperation between organized feminism , press and church "and" the hatred of crazy radical feminists "". In 2013, the ZEGG issued a detailed statement on these allegations.

The ZEGG is now valued and praised in local politics and business circles. In 2016, on the occasion of its 25th anniversary, the deputy councilor of the Potsdam-Mittelmark district Christian Stein ( CDU ) said "If the whole district would act ecologically as you do here, we would have significantly fewer problems." In addition, the ZEGG is a important economic factor for the region. Christian Kirchner, the managing director of Bad Belzig Kur GmbH, said, "Above all, the ZEGG is an enrichment for the way people think in this sparsely populated area".

Books, brochures, articles

  • Louis Lerouge: ZEGG: Sexism, Racism and New Age. In: Schwarzer Faden , 14th year, issue No. 47 (3/93), pp. 24–29 (anarchist criticism)
  • Luther Brünzels: ZEEG . Brochure 2007, as a PDF file ( Memento from November 27, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
  • Isabelle Fremeaux, John Jordan: Paths through Utopia. A book-film , Edition Nautilus, 2012
  • Engelhardt, Marc: Completely utopian. 17 Examples of a Better World , Random House, 2013
  • Alastair Fuad-Luke, Anja-Lisa Hirscher and Katharina Moebus: Agents of Alternatives. Redesigning our realities , 2015

Media coverage

Web links

Commons : ZEGG  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b http://zegg-forum.org
  2. ↑ www.zegg-liebesakademie.de
  3. ↑ https://www.come-together-songs.de
  4. ↑ https://www.attac.de/was-ist-attac/struktur/attac-netzwerk/habenseinrichtungen/
  5. ↑ https://stellungnahme.zegg.de/politische-aktivitaeten.php
  6. ↑ Gerald Hüther - Community, living together
  7. ↑ Organizational structure in the ZEGG (PDF), accessed on October 4, 2011
  8. ↑ 16 years of ZEGGsism Luther Brünzel November 2007
  9. ↑ https://www.zegg.de/de/mediathek/news-archiv/1048-jahresbericht-2019.html ZEGG annual report 2019, accessed February 13, 2020
  10. ↑ Ilse Lenz: The new women's movement in Germany: Farewell to the small difference . Springer, 2010, p. 282
  11. ↑ Anita Heiliger : Pedophilia. Definition, self-portrayal, strategies for winning victims and options for counteraction Deutsche Jugend 4/2008, pp. 166–174
  12. ↑ Sexual Abuse: False Child Friends , in Emma, ​​September 1, 1993, last seen on August 4, 2014
  13. ↑ Jutta Ditfurth : Relaxed into barbarism: esotericism, (eco) fascism and biocentrism . Konkret Literatur Verlag, 1996, p. 63f
  14. ↑ No sex with children Statement of the ZEGG community on recurring allegations and rumors 2013
  15. ↑ Saskia Kirf: Brandenburg's eco-commune celebrates its anniversary , in Märkische Allgemeine Zeitung , on July 4, 2016, available on maz-online.de, accessed on September 22, 2018.
  16. ↑ Press portal: Dawn Porter tests the love six-part report series in ZDFneo , at presseportal.de, accessed on September 22, 2018

Coordinates: 52 ° 9 ′ 26 ″  N , 12 ° 35 ′ 27 ″  E